Tag: red pill

I was listening to the Z-Man’s Friday morning podcast this morning. It’s on the Ancient Greeks and since that is something that I’m more than somewhat steeped in it was quite a lot of fun to listen to. Lots of good comparisons between Ancient Athens and the United States. What was topical was at minute 56 of the podcast he mentions that broadcast that Tucker Carlson did recently. I linked to it a couple of days ago and said it sounded like Tucker was running for President. What the Z-Man said was that it sounded like Carlson was reading aloud some of the dissident right posts that he and the other writers have been putting out for six or more years.

What this reminds me of is Vox Day’s constant refrain that “the Alt-Right is inevitable.” Well, I don’t know if the Alt-Right or the Dissident Right’s agenda is inevitable but what seems to inevitable is that a very good chunk of the American Nation is waking up to the fact that they’ve been putting their faith in men who really couldn’t care less if they lived or died. In fact, it appears they’d prefer it if we just up and died as quickly as possible. Call it the shifting Overton window or the red-pilling of the normies or whatever you like but if a Cloud Dweller like Tucker Carlson is coming around to the nitty gritty of where we’re headed then it won’t be long before even the most brain-dead denizen of Squaresville, USA will be waking up to the realization that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney do not mean them well.

What I’m curious about is what will be the next big step change. In the same way as Blue States practice civil disobedience such as Sanctuary Cities, will Red States start protecting their citizens against national policies that they object to? For instance, if companies like Master Card and Google continue de-platforming conservatives could state attorneys general begin legal proceedings against these companies to force them to relent? Maybe they’ll prosecute the local universities that indoctrinate kids and strip them of their legal rights.

Honestly, I don’t know what’s next. But it does appear that dissident ideas are getting mainstreamed at least to some extent. Reading about the Baltimore lawyer who is suing the Southern Poverty Law Center and attempting to have their tax-free status revoked for using illegal tactics to get him fired from the Baltimore City government sounds like maybe a first step to addressing the radical de-platforming. Hearing this week that Master Card may be joining forces with the crowd-funding companies to deny access to e-commerce to conservatives sounds like some kind of Maoist or Stalinist internal exile tactic. At lest in the gulag they fed you once in a while. In our cashless society, denial of access to a credit card is tantamount to being an exile from modern life.

And this all points to the paradox of how I feel about the current situation. A few years ago, I didn’t know just how bad it really was but I was almost in depression because I couldn’t understand why we kept losing when we seemed to have the upper hand. Now I realize just how bad it is and that most of our “leaders” aren’t really trying to help us and yet I’m actually strangely optimistic. I feel like knowing the problem makes it possible for me to take some actions and improve how I live my life.

Will the unrest on the right reach critical mass? It’s hard to say but I’m interested to see what Tucker Carlson ends up doing in the next year or two. He’s a popular journalist and could do a lot to persuade people. Stay tuned.

Much digital ink has been spent burying the spectre of the Alt-Right. Probably most of this is butt-covering going on trying to assure the powers that be that the individual in question is NOT of the Alt-Right and therefore not deserving of de-platforming.

Along with this interment is the surprising fact that most people (including myself) are not entirely sure what the definition and origins of the Alt-Right precisely are. I know that depending on the exact capitalization and hyphenation of the name it can be the Richard Spencer coined term for the white identitarian group that he belongs to. Other versions of this and similar expressions like Dissident Right have different emphases and appeal to different points of view.

But whatever names and whatever divisions these groups make between each other (and they certainly do that), one thing is undeniable. These were the groups that identified the real problems afflicting the United States and they were the ones who backed Donald Trump before anyone else even thought he was serious. Whatever else they are wrong about they were right about those things. To deny that is to deny the truth.

And the other thing that needs to be said and that is the central point of this post is that they along with President Trump are responsible for moving the Overton Window to the point where even the normies like me have heard the details of what the Alt-Right knew and have incorporated it into our world view. No one bothers to even dispute the platitudes of the Establishment GOP when they’re mouthed. We might give a sarcastic snort and then close the link and go to some useful website where actual thinking is going on. The Alt-Right and Donald Trump truly revealed why the right always lost. It was because our supposed leaders didn’t want to win. They just wanted the job of losing.

Now, all of this is old hat. We all know all of this. But it was hammered home to me when I was perusing an article in American Greatness by Christopher Roach entitled “The Radicalism of Conservatism, Inc.” Now it’s a very good article and it delves into the history of how the establishment right became so wrong on how to win. But reading the description of how Trump deconstructed the “illegal immigration is an act of love,” and describing establishment conservatives by saying, “that they function chiefly as the palace guard for yesterday’s liberalism” could have come directly out of a ZMan post from a year ago. What that tells me is the knowledge that the Alt-Right pioneered has been successfully dispersed into the bloodstream of the conservative body politic (if I may mangle a metaphor that far).

Whatever agreements or disagreements we may have with either the tactics or the substance of what the Alt-Right believes we have to acknowledge that they have red-pilled a significant part of the normie right. And that is without a doubt an enormous achievement. Without them maybe Clinton beats Trump and with a solid liberal majority on the Supreme Court we might now be watching as the First and Second Amendments were being effectively chloroformed.

The good folks at American Greatness have gone temporarily insane and published an article by an anonymous troll calling himself “photog.” Said troll claims to run a website called Orion’s Cold Fire and for his theme chose “Defining the Space Between Never-Trump and the Alt-Right.” The article is overheated and borderline psychotic but I’ll leave it to you to judge the merits of the argument, such as it is.

Excuse me. I have the inexplicable desire to shoot off some fireworks in the yard. Life is good.

Since my readers don’t always stop by every day I figured I’d paste this poll on each post for a while to see what folks call themselves. This is the post the poll came from Who Are We?

… And that got me thinking. Who are the people who read my blog? I thought it might be fun to see what the cross-section looked like. If you feel like saying what you believe in, feel free to leave a comment and/or pick a label from the poll below. I think it might be interesting.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post called “Talking to the Sleepwalkers” in which I described how I attempted to explain what Trump was all about to friends who were still looking at things from the point of view that the Republicans were actually conservative. At the end of the post I wrote, “Did I wake anyone up? I don’t know, but at least now I feel like I want to keep trying.”

Well yesterday an echo pinged back on the sonar. I was pointed to an article in the WSJ by one of the folks I was talking about before. It was entitled:

It’s a description of how the “New World Order” crowd convinced us (and themselves?) that they were conservative. I guess I got through. Good. That’s a first step. And an important one. Until you know what the problem is, you can’t possibly start working to effectively to fix it.

A couple of years into this brave new world of right wing revolt we still don’t even know what we are actually doing. The grass roots agitators aren’t even aligned. In fact, they don’t even know what to call themselves yet. Alt-Right, Dissident Right, Alt-West, Nationalists, Populists, etc. And of course, factionalism and cults of personality and disagreements on just about every subject imaginable are on display and defeatists and concern trolls are packed cheek to jowl as far as the eye can see.

But it’s still infinitely better than not knowing why every action by “our side” was a defeat and every day brought a new outrage that went unchecked. And Trump is still in his White House so “all’s right with the world.” Of late my joy at his almost uncanny ability to trigger my worst enemies into paroxysms of rage is becoming almost embarrassing. At work, I’ll be writing some mundane list or power point slide and I’ll think about his NFL or Weinstein tweets and stop and smile and get some coffee and e-mail a friend about it. It’s definitely cutting into my productivity but it’s also lowering my blood pressure and overall that’s good for everything including ability to do work. And I imagine it’s having the opposite effect on my left-wing counterparts. They probably hear about these things and get driven into a rage spiral and that’s got to be bad for the blood pressure and quality of life. Ah, sweet schadenfreude.

To get back to the original point, word’s getting out. Reach out to the unaware. They can be reached. And Trump is doing his part. He goes after those we aren’t allowed to touch. The more Trump calls out the bullies the clearer it becomes that they are the problem. Pretty soon even Great Aunt Sophie may know what Fake News is. If everyone who can be reached knows what’s going on, then we can figure out whether a national consensus can be reached. So, if 55-60% of the country can agree that the left is the problem (including the GOPE) then maybe we can turn this around. If not, then we’re headed down the road to tribalism and identity politics and the end of the American Dream. But even if we end up there we’re better off than if we got there without knowing why and how. We can dictate some of the terms of the divorce. Cold comfort? Maybe, but I’ll take it.